Introduction

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) [1] tracks green space availability across U.S. using the proprietary ParkScore index. This index measures how well cities are meeting their residents’ need for public parks based on several categories:

Each city is awarded up to 100 points based on each one of these categories, and total of the scores is normalized to form an overall ParkScore rating. The data is taken from the Tidy Tuesday project [2]. In this report, we would like conduct exploratory data analysis to explore yearly trends across different categories of ParkScore and how the TPL has changed their methodology. We also explore importance of certain park features to their rankings. Finally, we analyze the newest 2021 data published by TPL to uncover how addition of the equity category to the ParkScore has affected cities’ rankings.

Regional patterns

WOULD NOT SHOW UP TO SPEED UP TESTING. REMOVE “EVAL=FALSE” IN THE END

Data cleaning and imputation

Data analysis

Distribution of variables

Variables over the years. Increasing trend in park size, park access, playground scores

Park Scores vs. Features. TPL has different max. scores or feature weight across years. 2020-21 scores are higher across park size, easier accessibility and investment in parks features.

Amenities: (number of) basketball hoops, dog parks, playgrounds. Overall increasing trend in score with better amenities. But plateaus

Top ranking cities across years

Exploring equity in 2021

TPL added 4 features that go into the new equity score : park space ratio and 10-minute walk for low-income and people of color.

Hard to directly compare statistics since they changed weighting methods.

##       [,1] [,2]                  [,3]           
##  [1,] "1"  "Minneapolis"         "Washington"   
##  [2,] "2"  "Washington, D.C."    "St. Paul"     
##  [3,] "3"  "St. Paul"            "Minneapolis"  
##  [4,] "4"  "Arlington, Virginia" "Arlington"    
##  [5,] "5"  "Cincinnati"          "Chicago"      
##  [6,] "6"  "Portland"            "San Francisco"
##  [7,] "7"  "Irvine"              "Irvine"       
##  [8,] "8"  "San Francisco"       "Cincinnati"   
##  [9,] "9"  "Boston"              "Seattle"      
## [10,] "10" "Chicago"             "Portland"

Conclusion

Pay attention to the different scores range/weight across the years

Parks tend to have greater score with larger park size, easier accessibility, higher investment and more facilities.

TPL affected rankings of a lot of cities by including an equity metric in

References

[1] https://www.tpl.org/parkscore

[2] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/master/data/2021/2021-06-22/readme.md